Dropbox just released another awesome feature that I have been waiting for so long. Now with this new feature, called File Request, I can let anyone, whether they are Dropbox user or not, to upload files directly to a folder inside my Dropbox, no matter how big the files are. It’s going to make a lot of people’s life a lot easier.

If this is the first time you heard of this, let me show you how to use it.

Log in to your Dropbox web console, click the new added File Request link on the left sidebar, then click the blue Create file request button.

Type in some brief information about the files you are requesting, and select a folder to store all uploaded files. You can also create a brand new folder to receive files as well. Note that unless you share those uploaded files, no one but yourself can see them.

Then click Next button to get the URL that you can share with your party to let them upload the file. You can copy the link or directly send it via email.

You can create as many as File Requests for different purposes and you can manage all these requests in the web console as well, including close the Request that has done its duty and is no longer needed.

Now let’s see what it looks like when other people open up this URL in the browser.

Clicking on the blue Choose files button brings up the file dialog box where you can select multiple files that you want to upload. All it requires is to put your name and a valid email address.

Back to the Dropbox web console, you will see the number of submissions as well as the files with named with their username in the upload folder.

That’s about it. Pretty easy and straightforward.

From now on, if you have a Dropbox account and need someone to send you files that are too big to your email, you can set up a File Request just like we did here. Note that, every file that gets uploaded to your Dropbox is transferred through SSL-encrypted web server. But if you need a more secure way that also encrypts the files when uploaded, check out this post that uses a 3rd party encryption solution called Sookasa to do the job for you.